Xray Xeroxx

Reviews

Xray Xeroxx Art Rock! cassette

XRAY XEROXX brings medium-fi garage punk that is stylistically all over the place. The first two tracks revel in thick, fuzzy chord progressions with catchy, gruff vocals, resulting in grunge-meets-garage Warped Tour fodder—essentially NOFX with a Big Muff pedal, which is probably a cup of tea quite a few people enjoy. The second half sucks in a different way. Not to weaponize the band name, but “Art Rock!” and “1.21 Jiggawatts” sound like cheap, bad copies of quirky egg-punk bands without the nervous weirdo energy and rawness that make the microgenre tolerable. The tracks feel calculated and inauthentic, and while snappy with their squiggly synths and jerky vocals, smack of forgettable genre tourism. Lyrics to “Art Rock!” say, “Is this new wave or no wave? / Who’s to say? / Is this grunge, is it shoegaze? / Is it cliche? / Is this new wave or no wave? / Who’s to say either way? / But would I listen to it? / No way!” Yeah, same.

Xray Xeroxx Social Media Made Me Hate My Friends cassette

Short and sweet four-song cassette EP by an incredibly active Los Angeles-based solo project. This is the third cassette release by XRAY XEROXX (two EPs and a full-length), all of which came out this damn year! Juvenile, upbeat, poppy, garage-infused RAMONES-core filled with both self-deprecation and societal deprecation. There sure is a lot to hate in this world, but I do not hate XRAY XEROXX. Looking forward to the three releases this project is due to shit out throughout 2026.

Xray Xeroxx Nevermind, Whatever cassette

The forgotten Ramone was surely Eggy Ramone, no? XRAY XEROXX embodies the spirit of this made-up Ramone by giving us fourteen tracks of egged-up, RAMONES-meets-DEVO sugar rushes. While RAMONES and DEVO certainly get called to mind almost immediately, as the album goes on, those comparisons start to (d)evolve into something more like the QUEERS and the AQUABATS—the immaturity of the lyrics, the performance/persona behind the music. These songs are definitely fun and snotty, but it does have me wondering if today’s mainstream high schooler views this type of egg-punk in the same way a normie twenty years ago viewed REEL BIG FISH or the MAD CADDIES? Are lots of synth punks today just former marching band kids? Does SNOOPER sing along to MEPHISKAPHELES? Did PRISON AFFAIR perform in their high school musicals?